Outgoing Board of Education members Leslie Moriarty, left, and Nancy Kail, right, talk about their time on the board at the Greenwich Time office in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday, November 14, 2013.
Photo: Lindsay Perry

Outgoing Board of Education members Leslie Moriarty, left, and Nancy Kail, right, talk about their time on the board at the Greenwich Time office in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday, November 14, 2013.
Photo: Lindsay Perry

Outgoing Board of Education members Leslie Moriarty, left, Nancy Kail, center, and Steve Anderson, right, talk about their time on the board at the Greenwich Time office in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday, November 14, 2013.
Photo: Lindsay Perry

Outgoing Board of Education members Leslie Moriarty, left, Nancy Kail, center, and Steve Anderson, right, talk about their time on the board at the Greenwich Time office in Greenwich, Conn., on Thursday, November 14, 2013.
Photo: Lindsay Perry

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They reviewed thousands of pages of documents. They sat through hundreds of meetings. They reviewed hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets. And now their time left on one of the most high-profile town boards has dwindled to zero.

Thursday night's Town Hall Board of Education meeting was the last for Leslie Moriarty, Steven Anderson and Nancy Kail. Moriarty and Anderson both served two board terms; Kail served one. Moriarty served as chairman since 2011; Anderson was chairman from 2009 to 2011. None sought new terms this year.

The departing trio sat down this week to discuss some of the top issues facing the school district.

Q: What were the greatest challenges that you faced as a member of the Board of Education?

MORIARTY: The fact that we had turnover in leadership at the administration impacted the ability to really make significant progress in a lot of areas. I think that the district has done a lot of things and has made progress. But without the continued focus by a single vision and a single leader, it impedes your ability to make as much progress as you want to. That, to me, is a disappointment that that's the way things occurred in our community and within the schools.

ANDERSON: The challenge was, when you're facing an increasingly diverse student body and not everything is moving up at the speed you want it to move. It's a bit of a Catch-22. It's public school. It's who walks through your door, and you need to get all of them performing at a high level. It's hard to get all 9,000 kids (in the district) going at once.

There is a lot of validity to what Leslie and Nancy said about consistency at the top, a consistent message that is percolating down to the boots on the ground, the teachers. We've taken some steps over the last eight years, things like TEPL, the teacher evaluation plan, that have really helped focus in on getting all of the kids moving up as much as they can.

KAIL: I only had four years on the board, and during that time I enjoyed dealing with three different superintendents. So to keep everything moving in the right direction when you have that turnover is a challenge. Everything we do is conducted in the public. To get things accomplished by vote, by forging consensus on big issues with that turnover and understanding that process was a big challenge. It took me a while to get used to that.

Q: How would you assess the board's progress in addressing racial imbalance and facility use issues in the elementary schools?

MORIARTY: I think the actions that the board has taken so far have highlighted that achievement piece in this whole (facility use and racial imbalance) issue. The board approved a study of new themes focusing on academics at Hamilton Avenue School. We approved the identification of alternate program services and other methods of focusing on that achievement gap and the achievement issues at our Title I schools.

Those are all topics that as a board we've dealt with and have encouraged over the last few years, but never had the vehicle to really get the consensus both from the community and the administration to move forward aggressively on them. I think we have that now, we see it in the budget, and we see it in the priority action items we've asked of the administration.

ANDERSON: I hope whatever the final solution is, it's a long-term solution. It's not a one-year fix, a two-year fix. This is the ultimate sausage-making in public routine. And it's messy, and it stirs up fears. It also creates great passion, which if harnessed correctly, can be a great thing. It's not something that you want to go through every other year, so whatever the solution is, my advocacy would be that it's a long-term solution.

KAIL: I'm proud of how the board and the administration and the community have tackled this issue. There's not a more fraught topic that I can think of than what we've been dealing with these past several months with FURB. If you look at the silver lining in all of this, it's really galvanized some wonderful participation from the community in helping to resolve the issues before us. It's been messy at times, but the board followed a process that I think really worked in terms of resolving these issues, and it's brought us to a point where I'm sure the new board will be successful in carrying forward and resolving this.

Q: For Greenwich's level of public-school spending, some community members argue that the district's students should score higher on average on standardized tests, especially compared to similar districts in the metropolitan New York region. How would you respond to that position?

MORIARTY: There's an opportunity for the district to present its results and achievements better. For example, when parents come to a district or choose which house they want to buy to go to an individual school, they'll go and look at (Connecticut Mastery Test) test scores for that school. Our buildings that are comparable to (District Reference Group) A districts, if you match those results up, we perform at the same level. We're getting better growth from our students and the overall test scores are a comparable level. So you need to look at the student body and what we're doing within the school.

ANDERSON: I want us to be No. 1 in everything. I don't care if it's football or the math team or fifth-grade CMT scores. I want us to be No. 1. The reality is you do have to pull back and say what are the 9,000 students that are coming into your classrooms every day, and how does that compare to a Darien, a New Canaan, a Westport, a Scarsdale, (N.Y.), to try to really say how much are we advancing these kids. If you get a bunch of kids who started at 94 and you advance them to 95, that's OK, but if you've got a bunch of kids who came in at 50 and you advance them to 85, that's huge. And you really want every kid to be advancing as much as they can.

KAIL: I take issue with the fact that we have a lot of different ways to measure the success of our kids because how are you going to measure the success, for example, of our (International Baccalaureate) program? And how are you going to measure the success of our Vision of the Graduate? We don't have good measures, yet folks from New Lebanon (School) and (The International School at Dundee) swear by those amazing programs. They want more of it in the middle schools, and this year we gave it to them with a Western (Middle School) IB program. These are qualities and characteristics that we want in our kids, as much as we want from the academic side. It's elusive now how we're going to measure it.

Let's talk about college readiness and success after you graduate from high school -- how are we going to measure that? I think we're doing great things in those areas, but we don't have the quantitative proof that people rightly demand to show for it. Hopefully that's coming down the pike.

Q: What are your expectations for the district's transition in 2014 to new Common Core-aligned standardized exams from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium?

MORIARTY: We're understanding that this transition to this test is extremely challenging. And it's not just the content of the material that is challenging, it's the physical way the test is being delivered, down to third grade, up to 11th (grade), that it requires technology skills that many of our students have, but we don't know if everybody has it -- keyboarding, looking at multiple screens and flipping between screens during a test. It's going to be a bumpy transition, I think, and hopefully we will be able to communicate the challenge, both of the test-taking and help to interpret those results to the community as they come in.

ANDERSON: The big thing is just reiterating over and over again as we switch over to SBAC and Common Core, those just need to be the floors for what we look at in terms of results. It's similar to CMTs. We don't sit there and only look at proficient and say "Gee, we're doing well because we have 92 percent at proficient." You want to see how many are at goal, how many are at advanced, how many are at mastery. You really want to set the bar as high as you can within a community that has high expectations.

KAIL: I hope that students and the community are patient with Greenwich Public Schools over he next couple of years, as everybody works to adopt these Common Core standards and the new testing. It's research-driven, it's better preparing our kids for college and career readiness, and they're here to stay.

We hired [Superintendent] Bill McKersie -- one of the reasons was his expertise in Common Core. And he hired a CIPL director [Irene Parisi, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and professional learning] because of her expertise in Common Core. So we're well-positioned to eventually successfully make those Common Core standards stick and embrace them. It'll just, like everything in education, take some time.